Postface to Paradiso

This is the postface Lorenzo Castore wrote for his book "Paradiso". It is a beautiful piece, reminding me of many of the themes we discussed in the workshop. It also testifies to his tough, tragic Lebensgefühl, torn between an uncompromising search for truth and the inevitability of defeat. There is something of Bushido, the warrior ethic, that pervades this uncompromising stance to life. Interestingly, there is a picture of Lorenzo, taken by Anders Petersen, to accompany the text. He is seated on café chair, under an arcade. It could be Turin or Paris. His face is turned away from the camera. A rangefinder camera in his left hand. He is clad in jeans, black sneakers and a hooded anorak and looks like a WWII paratrooper. The compact stature, bald head, the angularity of his features, the edginess of his pose reinforce the impression of alertness, of readiness to fight, of toughness. Beautiful picture, beautifully illuminating one side of this remarkable person.

These photographs were shot in Havana and in Mexico City between 2001 and 2002. They talk about that period, and about the urgency to work free of constraint, without having to rationalize or to explain what I was doing and why – to myself or anyone else.

It was an urgency, precisely that, a necessity which could not be delayed. I won’t talk about the significance of attributing the results to the urgency, primarily because I’m not the one who has to interpret or give a name to what I am doing, but also because I can’t find the right words to answer certain questions. Ultimately, everyone will find their own words and interpretations – ones which, hopefully, will always be different for each person.

I definitely wanted to do colour photographs, in which the colours were the active part, had a strong emotional impact, and didn’t bring to the image either a realistic and/or a decorative element. As frequently happens, I chose surroundings in which I could work arbitrarily and intuitively.

I need to return to the matter of urgency, because for me it is the only essential aspect of photography, absolutely central, and because it is the ever changing direction that leads our nervous tension towards the truth – a big word but I believe the only possible one to refer to all these things.

I don’t believe in talent alone, I absolutely don’t believe in style and I don’t believe in photography itself. It is purely circumstance that led me to photography: to come to terms with myself, to see myself reflected in others and others in me, to create relationships with everything. I would like to think, though, if my life had taken another path, that whatever I did would have done with the very same dedication, joy and suffering with which I photograph.

“He who lives worries about living truthfully and not whether his life is the same as his neighbour’s, he lives alone really and is convinced that a sincere life is, however individual, in its essence, completely unrepeatable.” (The Royal Doors, Pavel Florenskij).

Life is much more interesting than art, or they are the same thing. And so, when I say that I don’t believe in photography it is because it is only an instrument, a passion with wich to confront something much more intense and absolute.

The same is true of style. I can do colour photography, tomorrow black and white, I can use different formats, and conmpletely change the subject matter or language. The only thing which counts is the energy that unleashes what we do, the shape that we give it is a robe that we put on each time, depending on mood.

I also think that it is very risky to identify oneself or to feel completely at ease in an appearance. Beyond all of this there is the sensation of defeat which is always present. Being able to publish”Paradiso” is above all a huge liberation. It allows me to put behind me something that was important, and move on to something else in a definitive way.

Running after this imaginary truth, not exactly knowing what it is about, and knowing even less about how to arrive at it, is a race without end – at times discomforting, at others exalting – but one nevers turns back from it. The march is interminable, always looking ahead to accomplish what hasn’t aldready been done, and to do it better – with the knowledge that it will, however, always be defective, imperfect, incomplete – just as we are.

An inevitable failure.

As Alberto Giacometti wrote. I do what I do “to bit at reality, to defend myself, to feed myself, to grow, grow to better defend myself,to better attack, to better conquer, to move forward as best possible on all levels, in all directions, to defind myself against hunger, against the cold, against death, to be as free as possible; the most free that I can be to attempt – with my own means – to see better, to better understand everything around me; to understand better in order to be more free, to be the strongest possible, to dedicate, to dedicate to myself as much as possible to what I do, to run my adventure, to discover new worlds, to fight my war – for the pleasure? For the joy? of the war – for the pleasure to win and to lose.”

To add anything else would be difficult.

Lorenzo Castore

Preface to the Capitals

Yesterday I finally sat down to write the preface to the Capitals booklet. It's something I have been postponing for a long time. First I wanted to find someone to do the job for me. Something neutral, about Europe, not about the pictures. I asked Tony Judd and William Hitchcock, both authors of influential studies on postwar Europe. They kindly and sympathetically declined, citing too many other responsibilities. There has been the vague opportunity of someone of the Friends of Europe taking on the trouble to write something. But now I've taken it in my own hands. It's difficult, because there is not a lot to say about it. I visited 27 cities, camera in hand. So what? I don't want to be too intellectual and certainly not too artsy (the former is a worse crime than the latter). I want something simple and plain. This is my first (and maybe final) draft:

This book contains 27 pictures, one from each capital on the expanding jigsaw puzzle of European member states. The project grew organically, up to a certain point. There was a time when I travelled along a string of capital cities with other purposes than taking photographs in mind. However, I had my latest infatuation - a plastic, Russian panorama toy camera with a rotating lens – in my pocket. And I liked what I saw. So I started to plan other trips. And so the collection grew, to include all 27 of them.

It is true that these journeys took place at a time when the European Union went through a process of soul searching. The expansion of the Union to 25, then 27 member states, the debate on the failed Constitution, the Turkish dilemma … But I had no program, no position in these matters to defend. I had no other purpose than to spend some time in each of these 27 cities and to push the shutter once in a while.

I tried to stick to a fairly strict discipline. Each city was visited only once. No retrials possible. I confined myself to the extreme, dizzying perspective of my Horizon camera throughout the whole journey. None of the trips was planned in detail. I travelled, got out of the bus, plane or train, and basically started to walk wherever my feet would take me. Often such trips would become “trips”, where the rhythm of my steps, of my internal monologue, the frisson brought about by the unfamiliarity of my surroundings and the absence of a fixed end point or destination would blend into a pleasant sense of suspension, a flow in which taking pictures moved to the periphery of my awareness.

Throughout I have been grateful for the opportunity to travel so easily and carefree to the furthest confines of the Union. Schengen, budget airlines, a monetary union make travel a cakewalk compared to only 30 years ago, let alone 60 years ago when the continent and its people were ravaged by ferocious conflict. Whatever one may think of the European Union as an institution, there is no need to be blasé about its accomplishements as a force for peace and a more open society.

Both as a citizen and as a person manipulating a camera (or vice versa) I have learned quite a few things on this journey. And that was its only purpose. Now I have to move on.

Thanks to my wife Ann Coppens and my children Witold and Emma who are supporting my many idiosyncracies with admirable love, patience and, occasionally, refreshing irony; to Johan Doumont, a very generous and indefatigable friend; to Herman Van Campenhout and Luc Hoebeke, who kindly have taken the trouble to look and reflect; to Pol Leemans and Willy Robbeets for their generous sharing and assistance in the darkroom; to Frans Roex for amiable and reliable lab work; to Hans Bol, for his great professionalism and the generosity with which he shares the fruits of hard labour; to Jo Goossens, for his warm and genuine friendship, to Lorenzo Castore, who will think that I can do much better and therefore is a marvelous source of inspiration. Further thanks to Eddie Ephraums from Self Publishing Solutions, Tom Maes from Snoeck-Ducaju, David Titeca and Sophie Brassine from the Maison de l’Europe, Fabienne Langbeen and Anja van der Voorn from Enspiro, Jaak Sleypen from Beeld Express, Lucia Palomino-Gomez and Veerle Kumps from the European Commission, Werner Everaerts, Jos Mertens, Diana Vilyte, Masahiro Kakuwa, Adrian Taylor, Lore Vanhees, the City of Leuven, Marko Hehl, Franziska Hagedorn, Ulrich Döbler, Val in Sofia, and the unknown taxi driver/writer in Nicosia.

Concept vs Result?

Over the last months, I have been trying to bring the European Capitals project to an end. There is the exhibition in the Maison de l'Europe, mid-October. And there is the little book that I have been planning for so long. The book concept itself has been downsized to something fairly conventional as a result of my inability to find a binder that is able to produce a leporello at a decent price. And then there is the question of what images to put in the book. The portfolio offers various lines through the capitals maze and if I want to stick to one picture per capital there is an unavoidable choice to be made.

As a result of the workshop with Lorenzo Castore, I decided to have another look at the selection for the book. I wanted to do away with all the "pretty" pictures and focus on more edgy, less obviously readable pictures. So, I looked through the negatives again and came up with a choice that differed significantly from the previous selection.

I bothered two people, Johan Doumont and Lorenzo Castore, whose judgment I trust. Lorenzo shot back:

hey philippe,
i think you just have to move forward. yes, the new selection it is a bit better but you should not try to force something just to have a reasonably accettable result because you spend time money efforts to come out with a finished project. the concept of one picture one capital is weak, especially if so generic: or you decide to be extremely radical, also from the conceptual point of view, or the risk is to have a series of superficial good looking pictures which will just mix your feelings and probably confuse what we shared in toscana.
big hug,
lorenzo

In a way I was very happy with this reply. It was so characteristically Lorenzo. And in a way his point was very obvious, liberatingly obvious almost. Yes, I have to move on.

Johan had a very different take:

Some images are like stills from a movie, others just pertinent observations of a society in transition. But all pictures speak of a sense of wonder. Esthetics do not prevail, these are not "pretty" pictures, with perhaps one exception, and they don't pretend to capture to analyse a city and its people. It's just images of an outsider that observes things, wonders about them and captures them. "Look, this is what I have seen" No analysis, no explanation, no judgment. And that is how I personally like to take pictures too ...

Whilst Lorenzo's reply struck a chord, Johan's captured how I myself had wanted to position myself with respect to these pictures. So two very different assessments and I felt that there is truth in both. But why the difference? Johan explained to me:
I think there is a big difference in Lorenzo's truth and mine (...) I have made a point of it not to criticise a creative process, but only the results of that process. Whilst Lorenzo is probably not interested at all in the result, but only in the creative process. That 's exactly the opposite. However, I think I can only analyse, critique and adjust my own processes. I fear that doing this with other people is to break into their minds too much.

I thought Johan's comment was very much to the point and helped to explain the difference between the two assessments, but I wanted to know whether his focus on results rather than process was a matter of principle or pragmatics. He further explained that it is indeed a matter of prudence. Sometimes he is unable to critique the underlying concept because it is foreign to him and he simply doesn't understand. On the other hand, when a concept is obviously empty and fake (because someone emulates a style) then he has no scruples criticising it. Mostly, however, the situation is much less clear and it requires great delicacy in coaching someone to adopt another, more truthful approach to taking pictures.

However, Lorenzo's take is not just about coaching with the hammer, for the sheer fun of it (and Johan understands that). What he does is very hard, both for himself and for the learner. I am grateful for his kicking me under the butt and I'm grateful it's him kicking me. So I'll get it over and done with the Capitals booklet and then move on to something else.

Herman

A flattering portrait of our dear friend Herman! I caught him unawares with the CM. I think he'll like this one ... ;-)

Emma

Portrait of our daughter Emma, shortly after her 11th birthday.
Still a little girl, but not for very long, I guess.

Here is an apt poem by Lars Gustafsson (which I translated to English from a Dutch translation):

Martin Kober painted in 1596
Prince Ladislav of Poland, then one year old.
He is clothed in a costume of shiny grey
suede or brocade, ducal insigna
hang heavily from his neck, his left arm
makes a gesture, distracted and proud at once
as if about to invite to a sarabande or an other slow dance.
Wisely and clearly his old man’s eyes watch
us. They already contain his whole life.
Children on a group photo in front of Norreland sawing mills,
anno 1890, have similar eyes, serious,
but altogether less proud, but also they harbour everything.
These portraits, I mean, express much better
what man is than these photos,
at once from a distance and flattering
as became the custom when kids,
these little animals with tin soldiers and dolls,
marched into the perspective of the nineteenth century.
Not people. But not really something from
the zoo either. Rather something in between,
a kind of imitation of people
with coquettish gestures, as kittens,
with little drums, trumpets, rifles,
the midgets of the industrial bad conscience
that halfway the century clambered out of
childrens’ rooms.
Whilst the real children
- with other gestures – crawl ever deeper
in the dusty blindness of the British coal layers.
One learns them their own language,
with palatal consonants, so that they would believe
to be unique. Thus they are denied an insight
that could prove to be fatal.
There are days that I am looking for myself
chasing God knows what, across the years,
from the forties through the thirties.
I see myself, in short trousers,
sitting hours on end at the side of a lake.
Wavelets splash over small round stones.
A school of whitefish swims in at low tide.
From a distance of three decades I approach
the boy who is sitting there, quietly, quietly,
so that he will not notice who is standing there.
I want to see what he sees. When my shadow
falls over the water, the whitefish shoot off.
The boy is still there. His eyes are reflected in the water.
They are like the eyes of Ladislav, big, serious,
grown up: in the child there is no child.

Lars Gustaffson, 1980

Still same roll of Neopan 1600, Leica CM. Negative has been cropped, obviously.

Brussel-Noord

Shot this one from a moving train, pulling into Brussels. Still the same roll of Neopan 1600.

Ed's Diner

We had lunch at "Ed's Diner", a funny place right across the street from The Photographer's Gallery, off Leicester Square.

Nelson

One thing the workshop in Tuscany reminded me of is that you don't have pictures if you don't take any. So last week I went out with the Leica CM loaded with Neopan 1600 all the time. On Thursday I had an appointment in London. This is an image of the Mandela bust where I met my friend Barbara.

Flow

I'm still in great shape. Although work is finally overtaking me, the energising effect of the workshop lingers on and I have great appetite for pictures. The little CM goes with me everywhere.

Above another shot from our week in Pienza. I took it on Thursday morning. That's when I more or less took off. First I tried to take a stealth shot from this father and his daughter but he noticed me. So I asked and he agreed with my request. I came closer with the Rollei whilst the father didn't alter his pose. In a way I was touched by his quiet confidence of having a stranger move in so closely with a camera. I still wonder what the girl was reading ...

Tietz

My friend Marko Hehl is organising an exhibition at the Tietz, a cultural centre in his hometown Chemnitz (www.dastietz.de). He has invited me to share the wall space with him and his Japanese friend Nobuhiro Nagashima. I have prepared a set of 12 prints for the exhibition. Opening on September 15th. Thank you, Marko.

Star

Once more, Michel Serres. I read this passage after having taken the picture above. It is my self-portrait, taken by the hand of Alexander G., Thursday, August 9, 2007.

“Sensitivity haunts a central and peripheral place – in the form of a star.

Have you ever tended goal for your team, while an adversary hurries to take a clean, close shot? Relaxed, as if free, the body mimes the future participle, fully ready to unwind: toward the highest point, at ground level, or halfway up, in both directions, left and right; toward the center of the solar plexis, a starry plateau launches its virtual branches in all directions at once, like a bouquet of axons. This is the state of vibrating sensitivity – wakeful, alert, watchful – a call to the animal who passes close by, lying in wait, spying, a solicitation in every sense, from every direction for the whole admirable network of neurons (…) At the center of the star is hidden the third place, formerly called a soul, experienced by passing through a channel that is difficult to cross. The soul inhabits this pole of sensitivity, or virtual capacity, at the same time that it throws itself forward and holds back, that is, that it launches itself halfway, the length of the floating branches of the astral body that explores space, like a sun.”

Go swimming ...

A book I have spent considerable time with over the last few weeks, and which I had also in suitcase during the workshop, is “The Troubadour of Knowledge” from French philosopher Michel Serres. Much reminds me of the things we went through this week: we too went through this passage, through the third place, we too have been “cleansed, besmirched in sense and nonsense …”:

“No one really knows how to swim until he has crossed a large and impetuous river or a rough strait, an arm of the sea, alone. In a pool there is only the ground – a territory for a crowd of pedestrians. Depart, take the plunge. After having left the shore behind, for awhile you stay much closer to it, than to the one on the other side, at least just enough so that the body starts reckoning and says to itself, silently, that it can always go back. Up to a certain treshhold, you hold on to this feeling of security: in other words, you have not really left. On this side of the adventure, your foot, once it has crossed a second treshold, waits expectantly for the approach.: you find yourself close enough to the steep bank to say you have arrived. Right bank or left bank, what does it matter, in both cases it is land or ground. You do not swim, you wait to walk, like someone who jumps, takes off and then lands, but does not remain in flight.
The swimmer, to the contrary, knows that a second river runs in the other one that everyone sees, a river between the two tresholds, after or before which all security has vanished: there he abandons all reference points.”

“No, the game of pedagogy is in no respect a game for two, voyager and destination, but for three. The third place intervenes, there, as the treshold of passage. And, most often, neither the student nor the initiator know where this door is located nor what to do with it. One day, at some point, everyone passes through the middle of this white river, through the strange state of a phase change, which could be called sensitivity, a word that signifies possibility or capacity in every sense. Sensitive, for example, the scale when it seesaws up and down, vibrating, in the beautiful middle, in both directions; sensitive also the child who will walk when he throws himself into an unbalanced balance; observe him again when he immerses himself in speech, reading or writing, cleansed, besmirched in sense and nonsense. That state vibrates like an instability, a metastability, like a nonexcluded third between equilibrium and disequilibrium, between being and nothingness.”

“No learning can avoid the voyage. Under the supervision of a guide, education pushes one to the outside. Depart: go forth. Leave the womb of your mother, the crib, the shadow cast by your father’s house and the landscapes of your childhood. In the wind, in the rain: the outside has no shelters. Your initial ideas only repeat old phrases. Young: old parrot. The voyage of children, that is the naked meaning of the Greek word ‘pedagogy’. Learning launches wandering.”

“For there is no learning without exposure, often dangerous, to the other. I will never again know what I am, where I am, from where I’m from, where I’m going, through where to pass. I am exposed to others, to foreign things.”

(All quotes from the English translation of Le Tiers-Instruit, by Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson, University of Michigan Press, 1997).

R.I.N.A.S.C.I.M.E.N.T.O.

I have just returned from the TPW photo workshop with Lorenzo Castore. It has been a benchmark experience, a deep learning process as I have had the privilege to be part of only very very few times in my life. There is no doubt in my mind that Lorenzo is the most formidable teacher (or “initiator”) I ever met. He has given everything, wholeheartedly, authentically and deeply seriously. This has not been a course on technical trivia but it has been a process of six people – Alexander, Anastasia, Chiara, Federico, Lorenzo and myself - of coming to grips with photography as a way of honestly making sense of the world and our lives. The basis of this process of deep learning has been trust. During this week we have given it, unreservedly. It has carried us through occasional moments of great difficulty and delicacy. The result has been for me, and I am sure it applies to us all, a quantum leap in my development as a human being and as a photographer. I will never be able to deny that I went through this, that I have seen truth in pictures, that it is necessary to be ruthlessly critical to oneself. Today, as a result of this experience, I feel very strong. I hope this strength will stay with me. Thank you, Alexander, Anastasia, Chiara, Federico, Claudia, Giuliano, Lorenzo.

“Reborn, he know, he takes pity.
Finally, he can teach.” (Michel Serres).

Picture above taken on Tuesday, August 6th, 2007.

Castore workshop

Very soon I will have left for a 5-day photo workshop in Tuscany. It is organised by Tuscany Photographic Workshop (www.tpw.it). Location is the monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena, near Pienza. Originally I had booked another workshop on the Eolian Islands in spring. But I couldn't free myself at that time and switched to a summer course. The tutor is a young Italian photographer, Lorenzo Castore. His bio:

Lorenzo Castore was born in 1973 in Florence and moved to Rome in 1981. He began his career in photography in 1997, studying photography while still attending the University of Law. In 1999 he spent one year in New York. In the same year he travelled to India and exhibited at the Gallery di Via Minerva in Rome. In 1999 he won the second edition of the “Dintorni dello Sguardo” Award. He worked in Kosovo, India, New York (his exhibition, “Babylon, New York” was partially on 9/11), Poland “Szczesc Boze” and Cuba “Paradiso”. He documented the construction of the Arcimboldi Theater and of Pirelli’s Headquarters. His show “Paradiso” was exhibited at Grazia Neri Gallery in Milan and at the VU Gallery in Paris. He also exhibited his work “Nero” at Torre Littoria in Carbonia, at Palazzo Reale in Milan and in Cracow during the Month of Photography. Federico Motta published the book on this show. His photographs are a part of the collection of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna in Rome. In 2005 he works in Germany, Italy, France, Poland and England. His work is published in magazines such as Amica, Ventiquattro and Internazionale. In 2005 he has also won the Leica European Publishers’ Award for Photography. He is represented internationally by VU agency and in Italy by Grazia Neri Agency.

This is what he writes about the workshop:

“I don’t know where to begin from. I don’t think photography is something you can teach. I don’t want to impose a method, nor a style. The most important thing is to be open about who you are and what you want to say. I will not have a real schedule to offer you. My efforts will be to deconstruct the used and abused points of reference in photography and help you to confront with yourself in a immediate way. Photographing will become a simple and direct way to be closer to who and what you love, rather than a technical excuse to hide behind. A street, a wall, a story, a person, ourselves, all those things together, whatever you like. I am against dividing photography into categories: for me documentary photography, social photography, personal photography, landscape, portraiture, etc do not mean a thing. What is important is the attention you pay to what you do. Good photographs, are such because they are true, genuine. They become so when you try to reach the truth that is inside you and follow your personal vision. Forget yourself, put yourself in a uncomfortable situation, don’t be afraid, enjoy all these things. Well, these are the things I keep repeating to myself every morning in front of the mirror .”

I like the open, de-constructive approach and the focus on paying attention to what you do. So I am curious to see how it will go. I'll keep a diary which will be posted on the blog upon my return.

I am counting on a good opportunity to work on my Mediterra-portfolio. In terms of photo gear, my initial plan was to take a complete Hasselblad kit with me (including the ELX, the SWC, the Flexbody and two lenses plus tripod). But as I was packing yesterday it seemed like to much hassle, so I am now taking only a small bag with the Rolleiflex and the SWC and some Agfapan 100 and Rollei R3 400. That'll do. For note taking purposes I'll take the Leica CM with me. More news later.